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Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature recently accused the Catalan movement for independence of being “a threat to Spanish democracy“, in an article published at The New York Times. Yesterday, Joan Ramon Resina, Literature Professor and Director of the Iberian Studies Program of the Stanford University published a harsh response in a lenghty article at the Catalan daily Vilaweb:

Vilaweb | Mario Vargas Llosa, a Threat to Liberalism
‘Desmond Tutu, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, and Dario Fo, along with twenty-three other celebrities, had just signed a manifesto in support of the Catalans’ right to vote, calling on the Spanish government to negotiate in good faith according to the result’. ‘Vargas Llosa loved Barcelona under the Francoist boot, but his love soured when the city began to reassert its cultural personality, and he has been trying to bring it to heel with party shoes ever since’

AFP | Catalan self-rule camp smaller than it looks: analysts
“It is a mistake to confuse the noise in the street with general Catalan opinion, just as it is a mistake to belittle those two million supporters of independence,” said Jose Juan Toharia, a sociologist who heads the Metroscopia polling institute.

Independent | Bye, bye Barcelona?As with Scotland, the only solution may be for Madrid to grant Catalonia more autonomy and fiscal powers to dampen the appetite for independence. But this will surely also only fuel it, in which case we could be looking at the break up of modern Spain, a prospect that would cause alarm not just in Spain itself but in an ethnically restive Europe, that has many such potential break-away bits.

‘What Catalans wish to have recognised is nothing other peoples haven’t been recognised before. Scots, Quebeckers have enjoyed the recognition of the right to decide their political future. In both cases, they have decided to stay within their states, and we don’t have anything to object regarding this. Others, such as in Lithuania and Montenegro, people have decided that the time had come for them to become independent. This is why Catalans want to be treated in the same way. Are we Catalans different from Quebeckers or Lithuanians?’

International Viewpoint | Catalonia: After 9-N, where will it end?
After an agonising and convoluted process, where the thin red line that separates comedy from tragedy was not always clear, finally, 9-N took place. Half way between a legitimate official consultation and an act of civil and institutional disobedience as the realisation of the first version of the same would have represented, 9-N was finally as much a disobedient diversion that has eluded a surrender to the impositions of the state, as a direct institutional confrontation.

Xinhua | Spanish PM vows to “go to Catalonia”: media
“I am going to go to Catalonia and I will talk to the Catalans,” said [Spanish PM] Rajoy in a press conference held in Brisbane in which he commented he would explain his arguments “better than I have done until now.”

Catalonia in the Spotlight

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